I finished interviewing right before they shut down the team at the end of last month. Then the HM took a two-week vacation, and after waiting almost a month, I got the classic "they were touched but rejected me anyway" treatment — moved to another candidate.
It was for the AEP team, a referral pit from a friend. Four rounds total, overall not too hard.
The first round was billed as tech/coding, but after going through my resume, the interviewer just started asking about request latency analysis, plus some standard front-end/back-end fundamentals questions. I figured there'd be coding or system design, but it basically ended up being a conversation.
The second round was with the HM, all behavioral questions. Not much to say — just have your stories ready.
The third round was system design. The interviewer gave a quick greeting and then went straight into the problem: design a system to embed files uploaded by users, including documents, images, and videos. Each file is capped at some x MB, and it gets stored in a database. I felt like I did okay on this round, but the recruiter's feedback said they wanted someone with more system design experience — probably they actually wanted someone with an AI background.
The last round was real coding, nothing too hard — a standard course schedule problem, solved it instantly. Since there was still time left, they threw in another one: word count. I didn't write code for that one, just talked through the approach, and the follow-up was about how to handle it at scale — how to do it without MapReduce, how to set it up as a distributed system.
Overall the process felt fine and the recruiter was pretty proactive.
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